Turkey is offering a screen, not a summit. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, arrives in Ankara on Friday, 30 January as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tests an idea that suits Donald Trump’s taste for theatre: a teleconference between Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian. The call may never happen. The point is what it signals. Tehran is being invited back to bargaining at a moment when every option looks forced.

It is tempting to tell this story in the language of hardware: enrichment levels, warships and sanctions lists. Yet the decisive battlefield may be psychological. The sunk-cost fallacy describes leaders who keep investing in a failing course because they have already paid so much. Iran now faces an inverted version. The losses already absorbed make the least-bad exit politically poisonous unless the instinct for survival overrides the need to prove that yesterday’s sacrifices were worthwhile.

There is also an asymmetry built into Erdoğan’s proposal that matters more than the optics. For Trump, a call can be the beginning of a binding decision because the American chain of command is short. For Pezeshkian, a call is at best a signal that must travel upward through a system where the decisive authority on war and peace sits elsewhere. That does not make the screen meaningless. It makes it a tool of narrative management, not a mechanism of commitment.

Turkey is selling sequencing, not mediation

Ankara’s motive begins with geography. Turkey shares a 530-kilometre border with Iran and senior officials have spoken openly about reinforcing it if renewed strikes trigger instability and displacement. Turkey is not mediating out of sentiment. It is trying to contain a shock wave that would reach Turkish towns, markets and security services first.

Turkey’s more important offer is a method. Foreign minister Hakan Fidan has urged Washington to handle disputes “one by one”, starting with the nuclear file, because bundling every grievance into a single package would make any agreement harder to sell in Tehran. Sequencing does not change concessions. It changes what those concessions mean at home. A bounded nuclear arrangement can be framed as risk management. A deal that also demands changes on missiles and regional posture reads like a surrender list.

The external environment has........

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